


Kingdom by the Sea

by PanicFOB



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: AU not superheroes, Annabel Lee - Freeform, F/M, Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Loss/grieving, This will make you cry, You Have Been Warned, a less than happy ending, death of a main character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-16 11:17:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21270179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PanicFOB/pseuds/PanicFOB
Summary: A tragic tale of Bucky's perfect love and how he lost her. Inspired by the poem "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe.





	Kingdom by the Sea

**Author's Note:**

> The quotes at the beginning of each section are direct lines from the poem that this story is inspired by. I highly recommend that you go read that poem in its entirety if you haven't before because it is amazing.

"Many and many a year ago…"

They’d met barely a week after Bucky’s eighteenth birthday. He and Steve had driven their shiny new motorcycles out to Gravesend Bay, not far from the neighboring Brooklyn homes of their families. The spring air was too cold for swimming that day, but the beach was still rather crowded. Teens played volleyball in the sandpits. Parents wrangled their wild children as they tried to run out into the chilly waves. And the women. Bucky and Steve were both a little awestruck by the number of beautiful women playing Frisbee or eating ice cream cones with their groups of friends.

One, in particular, caught the dark-haired man’s eye. She was barefoot, toes buried in the sand, and there was a huge book resting in her lap. She seemed to be fully engrossed in the text. There were some other women sitting next to her, braiding each other’s hair. She paid her friends no attention, as if the only reason one should ever come to a beach was to enjoy the brilliant sentences in some ancient book alongside the soothing sound of rambunctious ocean waves.

She’d not seemed very pleased for him to be interrupting her reading at first, but by the time the sun was setting over the waters of Gravesend Bay, she was giving him her number to call for a date.

"But our love it was stronger by far than the love of those who were older than we…"

Her parents hated him. They despised him from the moment he picked her up on his bike for that first date. They loathed him when she started staying overnight at the apartment that he and Steve shared. She was in school at New York University, studying pre-med. They feared she’d lose her focus if she hung around a wild guy like Bucky. Not that he wasn’t in school too. He was actually studying literature, wanted to be a professor eventually. Simply owning a motorcycle didn’t mean he wasn’t the sort to get lost in a book or write poetry on the rare occasion. Bucky had a passion for examining the beauty of the written word, and he wanted to teach that passion to the next generation.

But the more vitriol that her parents spewed at her boyfriend, the more Y/N clung to his side and defended his name. Their love was young, but it was fierce. They understood that their devotion to each other could not be measured by age, but rather by depth and strength. After only a year and a half of blissful dates and passionate nights, he asked her to move in with him. Steve didn’t mind at all since he was spending all his spare time with his girlfriend Peggy. Bucky was pretty sure that he’d be asking Peggy to move in soon as well.

In those early days, Bucky sometimes believed that his love for Y/N was so intense that there was no way he could ever possibly love her more than he already did. But she was a woman of many surprises.

"And this maiden she lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me…"

Bucky had thought managing his time during the undergrad years had been hard. Grad school was a whole new evil entirely. When Steve and Peggy graduated, they decided to move off to Washington D.C., both getting low-level jobs at the CIA. Bucky missed his best friend, but he was happy for them, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity for him and Y/N to take a new step as well.

They used the savings that they’d both been building for years to purchase a tiny little place right on Gravesend Bay. It was where they’d first met, and it was where they wanted to spend their lives together.

Bucky asked her to marry him the day they moved in. She was all sweaty from hauling heavy boxes, and once Bucky carried in the last one from her little car, he found her draped across the hardwood floors in the furniture-less living room. Her eyes were closed, and she wore a content little smile on her face. He quickly dug in the box that contained his socks and underwear and found the object he was searching for. He smoothly slipped the ring on her left hand before she’d even opened her eyes.

Through the stress of Y/N becoming a doctor, through the stress of Bucky becoming a professor, through the stress of missing their good friends, and through the stress of still never having her parents’ support, nothing weighed as heavy on their hearts as the love that they shared. It was everything.

She told him this almost daily. In each kiss or caress. In each meal that they cooked together. In each heated entanglement on their lumpy bed. She emphasized their love and said that all other things came in second place.

"My darling, my darling, my life and my bride…"

Bucky waited for the other shoe to drop. He waited to grow weary of marriage. He waited to grow annoyed with the mere existence of her. He waited with bated breath for a moment that all married couples dreaded; the moment the love wasn’t the strongest emotion between them, the moment they would stop choosing each other over everything else in the world.

But it was as if by the sheer intensity with which he hoped that day wouldn’t come, the fates heard him and willed it away. They were so very lucky in love. They meshed together like two pieces of perfect Velcro, and it was rare that they ignited anything other than affection and attraction in each other. They had their fights, but they always ended as quickly as they’d started. They always made up with fervent kisses and incredibly hot sex. Most importantly, they never crossed any lines, never said anything they’d regret that couldn’t be taken back. When they fought, they never set out to hurt each other.

Their marriage probably seemed sickeningly perfect to any onlookers. It might have seemed fake, a façade that they put on out in public only to hate each other behind closed doors. It was all real though, every last part of their beautiful connection was genuine.

When they went jogging along the beach together every morning as the sun would rise, it wasn’t because of any sort of obligation to keep fit physiques; it was because they truly enjoyed doing something active together. When Bucky brought her lunch each day at the hospital where she was performing her last year of med school, it wasn’t to make the other doctors and nurses jealous; it was because he was concerned that she wouldn’t stop for a moment to eat something on her twelve-hour shift if he didn’t bring it from home.

All of the sunny days splashing around in the shallows at Gravesend. All of the late nights dancing at the beach-themed pub when Y/N didn’t have to be at the hospital early the next day. All of the times that she sat on their second-hand couch and pretended to be a student again so that he could practice his lectures to her. They were all simple moments that made up their glorious life together. They weren’t forced annoyances. They were illustrations of care and domesticity. They were paintings of happiness.

"The angels, not half so happy in Heaven, went envying her and me…"

Nearly nine years. That’s how long Bucky got to taste his all-encompassing bit of heaven. It shouldn’t seem fair for someone to have such perfection for even that long, but Bucky was selfish and wanted the heaven that was his marriage with Y/N to last for nearly ninety-years. He wanted to experience her wonder for all of eternity. He wanted to bask in her beauty for an infinite amount of time. Nine years wasn’t enough…

But the fates seemed to think so.

It was almost ironic that her first year as a resident, as a person devoted to saving those on the brink of death, determined to preserve every life that she encountered, she would lose her own.

Bucky shouldn’t have let her drive that stupid car to work that night. He should have driven her himself on his motorcycle. Her car had broken down three separate times in the past two months. Bucky should have made smarter choices for her. He should have kept her safe.

She’d made it nearly to the hospital before it broke down this time. She thought it would be safe to walk the rest of the way. She didn’t want to miss her shift. But Brooklyn wasn’t the safest place for a woman to be at night.

Bucky would never be clear on the details because, well, he hadn’t been there. If he had, then she’d still be with him. A man had mugged her at gunpoint. There was the possibility that she had refused to give him her purse. Or maybe she did give it to him, but he was cruel enough to shoot her anyway.

She lay on the street, only a block from the hospital, too dead for any of her fellow doctors to be able to do anything for her.

Bucky knew something was wrong when she didn’t send her usual “Made it to work” text.

He nearly drowned himself in Gravesend Bay that night when he got that call from the police department.

"For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams…"

Bucky slept for nearly a month. Steve and Peggy had returned to Brooklyn to help him cope. Y/N’s parents had handled the memorial service because Bucky was too distraught to function. He remembers very little about that first month. All he knew was that if he closed his eyes and let his consciousness slip away, she would be there waiting for him in his dreams.

So, he slept through all the days of his leave of absence. Steve encouraged him to get out of the house, go to therapy, a support group, anything. But none of those places sounded particularly interesting. His dreams were the only place where she lived.

Sometimes, in the dead of night, when all was still in the world, Bucky would make the brave step out of the back door and sit on the back porch of their beach house. The bright moon would beam down at him, and he would think of her while Steve and Peggy slept in his spare room. He was always thinking of her. Even when she had been alive, her vibrant life had consumed his thoughts from the moment they met on this very beach that the moon cast its light upon now. In death, the imprint she left on him was just as vibrant, just as visceral.

"And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes…"

Eventually, he had to return to work or he would lose his job. It was a painful process, standing there in front of his students and pretending to care about their education when the only concern he had was mourning his late wife.

He had gone from sleeping all the time to never sleeping at all. He was lucky if he got two hours per night these days. When his head fell against the pillow, her pillow, which had lost her sweet smell, his mind raced in anguish and agony. When he closed his heavy lids, all he could see were her stunning eyes staring back at him, and it was torture.

He would clean their home obsessively. He would flip through photo albums for hours, tears running down his face and pooling in his beard. He would walk the dark beach at the earliest of hours, picking up random pieces of litter just to give himself a feeling of purpose in the word.

That was the problem. Without her, Bucky had no purpose. Their love had been priority number one, always. Everything else was supposed to be second. But he couldn’t figure out what second thing was worthy of being promoted to first now that she was gone.

The moon still shined down on him, but Bucky could never spot a single star in the sky. He figured the dark night canvas felt just as empty as he did.

"And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by my side…"

Five months after her murder, Bucky finally decided to do something with her ashes. He waited until one of those nights where sleep had escaped him once again. He put on his best suit, the one that he was supposed to wear to the memorial service that he couldn’t get out of bed to go to. He left his feet bare, and he walked out all the way to the edge of the sand.

When the tide rushed in, it soaked the bottoms of his nice pants, but he didn’t care. He carefully removed the lid of her urn, and he spread the last piece of her out into the glimmering water.

Then, Bucky lay down on his side in the sand, watching the waves approach him and then turn away just before they reached the broken look on his face.

"And neither the angels in Heaven above, nor the demons down under the sea, can ever dissever my soul from the soul of the beautiful…"

One day, Bucky realized that he still felt connected to her. It wasn’t some sort of strange supernatural occurrence. He didn’t suspect that her ghost was lurking over his shoulder. It was just that his brain suddenly knew that their souls would still be intertwined for all the years to come. Death could not separate them, could not erase their love.

She had been taken away from him, but Bucky realized he still had the means to hold onto her. He wouldn’t let any fate decide that their love could not still be his number one priority.

It made all of the second-place things progressively easier to deal with. He grew to enjoy his teaching once again. He slowly made efforts to make amends with her parents. He resolved to go visit his own family more often in the face of his new awareness that life was very short. He rode his bike to D.C. on the weekend at least once a month. He surprisingly felt genuine joy when Steve told him that Peggy was pregnant.

Bucky might not ever get a taste of perfection in his life again, but the feeling of her beautiful soul clinging to his own as he sat with his feet buried in the sand, book in his lap, at Gravesend Bay was enough to soothe him in his worst moments. Nine years wasn’t enough. But it would have to be.


End file.
